with his ears raised. The dog had been drawn by the sound of the gunshot. There was
no sign of Carlos in the picture, but Sifkitz knew exactly where the body lay, on the
left, beside the work-table with the vise clamped to the edge. If his wife was home,
she would have heard the shot. If she was out—perhaps shopping, more likely at
work—it might be another hour or two before she came home and found him.
Beneath the image he had scrawled the words MAN WITH SHOTGUN. He couldn’t
remember doing this, but it was his printing and the right name for the picture. There
was no man visible in it, no shotgun, either, but it was the right title.
Sifkitz went to his couch, sat down on it, and put his head in his hands. His right hand
ached fiercely from clutching the unfamiliar, too-small drawing implement. He tried
to tell himself he’d just had a bad dream, the picture the result of that dream. That
there had never been any Carlos, never any Lipid Company, both of them were
figments of his own imagination, drawn from Dr. Brady’s careless metaphor.
But dreams faded, and these images—the phone with the crack in its beige case, the microwave, the bowl of bananas, the dog’s eye—were as clear as ever. Clearer, even.
One thing was sure, he told himself. He was done with the goddam stationary bike.
This was just a little too close to lunacy. If he kept on this way, soon he’d be cutting
off his ear and mailing it not to his girlfriend (he didn’t have one) but to Dr. Brady,
who was surely responsible for this.
“Done with the bike,” he said, with his head still in his hands. “Maybe I’ll get a
membership down at Fitness Boys, something like that, but I’m done with that
fucking stationary bike.”
Only he didn’t get a membership at The Fitness Boys, and after a week without real
exercise (he walked, but it wasn’t the same—there were too many people on the
sidewalks and he longed for the peace of the Herkimer Road), he could no longer
stand it. He was behind on his latest project, which was an illustration a la Norman
Rockwell for Fritos Corn Chips, and he’d had a call from both his agent and the guy
in charge of the Fritos account at the ad agency. This had never happened to him
before.
Worse, he wasn’t sleeping.
The urgency of the dream had faded a little, and he decided it was only the picture of
Carlos’s garage, glaring at him from the corner of the room, that kept bringing it back,
refreshing the dream the way a squirt of water from a mister may refresh a thirsty
plant. He couldn’t bring himself to destroy the picture (it was too damned good), but
he turned it around so that the image faced nothing but the wall.
That afternoon he rode the elevator down to the basement and remounted the
stationary bike. It turned into the old three-speed Raleigh almost as soon as he’d fixed
his eyes on the wall-projection, and he resumed his ride north. He tried to tell himself
that his sense of being followed was bogus, just something left over from his dream
and the frenzied hours at the easel afterward. For a little while this actually did the job
even though he knew better. He had reasons to make it do the job. The chief ones
were that he was sleeping through the night again and had resumed working on his
current assignment.
He finished the painting of the boys sharing a bag of Fritos on an idyllic suburban
pitcher’s mound, shipped it off by messenger, and the following day a check for ten
thousand, two hundred dollars came with a note from Barry Casselman, his agent.
You scared me a little, hon, the note said, and Sifkitz thought: You’re not the only one.
Hon.
Every now and then during the following week it occurred to him that he should tell
someone about his adventures under the red sky, and each time he dismissed the idea.
He could have told Trudy, but of course if Trudy had been around, things would never